Pinging Your Blog – To Ping or Not to Ping?

You should be pinging your blog each time you update your site with fresh content!

Pinging your blog allows you to automatically let the blog directories and search engines know that your blog has been updated.
One of the main reasons you should be pinging your blog is the search engines will quickly index your site, and thus drive traffic to it from several other sources.

One word of caution… If you are using a WordPress blog, by default, any time you hit the “Update” button WordPress will ping your blog. If you’re like me and make several changes along the way, this can be detrimental.

Pinging your blog too often will alert the search engines and you may be considered spamming… Worse yet, you could even get your website banned!

There is a work-around that I’ve found, it’s a plug-in for WordPress called, Ultimate Plugins – Smart Update Pinger

This plug-in will allow pinging your blog to happen only when you tell it to.

From the creators website:
Features:
1. Services are only pinged when a new post is created (not when an existing post is edited)

2. For future posts, services are only pinged when the post has appeared on your blog

3. Detailed reverse-style (newest entries first) logging

4. ‘Ping services now’ function

5. Auto-selects whether to do an extended or normal ping

6. For extended pings, it uses the new URL instead of just the homepage URL to ping (resulting in a much higher quality ping)

It keeps a complete log of the last 100 actions so you know exactly when your site is sending out a ping.

Smart Update Pinger updates through a service called Pingomatic and you can add several other pinging services to this plugin.

My good friend John Engle recommends using just one Ping service with the plug-in when pinging your blog, and manually pinging through these other 5 sites.

As John will tell you, there may only be 5 sites listed, but keep in mind, Pingler alone pings up to 84 websites, and the others will ping anywhere from 20 to 50.

You can keep that list in your settings but I would download the free plugin – Smart Update Pinger which will override WP from pinging each time you make a post or a correction to a post. Once you are satisfied with your post, you can manually ping all your services via the plugin-in just one time.

Twitter: footballwoodHello Richard,
I have uploaded a Ping list in general settings of Wordpress Blog. When ever I Publish a new post then it automatically sends updation to those ping sites. But after reading your post I think i should remove that list from Wordpress. Should I do this or there is any other way???
Thanks regards
TankyaTanya recently posted..FIFA 14 Release dates in countries trailer and platforms

Great post my friend. I just recently did a post on this on my blog, and you really hit some great points here. I don’t think a lot of bloggers are aware of this function in WordPress so its great that you are bringing it to the forefront. Thanks for bringing the value Richard.

I’ve been privileged to have been following your blog for a while now, and I just have to say what an amazing job you’re doing. This article reflects just how much your technical and writing expertise has flourished.

Hi Lynn,
You’re welcome, thanks for your comment.
I have to say, I was horrified when I found out it was possible to get banded from over pinging. When I first started out with my blog I was constantly correcting mistakes and there were times when I would hit that publish button 15 times or more, never realizing I was pinging each time.

Thanks Richard for sharing this awesome tip. I knew about WP auto pinging but did not know that if you edited your post it would ping again. That is good to know and I will certainly try out this plug-in that you recommend. I also will have to compare my ping list to that of your friend, John Engle.

Great words of advice there Richard! Pingomatic.com seems to be the most effective and efficient way of getting a new Wordpress site indexed on Google. But flip side of the coin, pinging too often is not appreciated by the search engines. Great post yet again. ThanksRobert recently posted..RIP Victims in Japan

More is better but keep in mind and make sure that all the ping services you are using, are not duplicating themselves. Pinging the same sites over and over again can look like you’re spamming and throw up a red flag.
The last thing you want to do is get your site banned. This could be one of those times that “Less is More”.

I actually have the smart update pinger. I’ve been sending “pings” out to a bunch of sites including pingomatic. I’ll add these five as well. Richard, why don’t you want to ping to more than these five sites? Isn’t more better?